We are thrilled to announce the NMCC graduates for the 2015 school year. This group of students has strengthened and inspired our NMCC community through their energy, curiosity and scholarly enthusiasm for all things new media. We are very proud of the hard work and perseverance that these students have displayed in their academic pursuits during their time with us, and we look forward to celebrating their scholarly, artistic, and technological accomplishments in the years ahead. Congratulations class of 2015!!
Farhad Bahram, MFA Fine Arts + Photography
Specializes in: Social Practice, Communication Design, and Public Performance
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
http://www.farhadbahram.com/
In my recent practice I develop my inquiries to further understand how the performance of actions and, also, relational aesthetics affect the outcome of our social encounter. By focusing on participatory and process-based works that engage with the idea of social intervention, I try to restructure my subject from the old Cartesian model to the contemporary one of lived bodily experiences – a concept of art which is no longer conceived of as noun/object but as a verb/process. This participatory process of intervention, addresses the deconstruction of medium as a traditional conveyor of a message and produces a latent and disruptive code for communicating; or in other words, as Josephine Bosma says in ‘Art as Experience’: “Less visible, but no less intrusive, are the immaterial echoes of our social encounter.”
Kelsey Cummings, MA Media Studies
Specializes in: Game Studies and Film Studies
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
My research on mobile and online girl games has been greatly informed by the courses I took for the New Media and Culture Certificate. Completing the certificate helped me discover my interest in the topic which became the subject of my thesis: “Gameplay Mechanics, Ideology, and Identity in Mobile and Online Girl Games.” Additionally, my work in the NMCC courses has allowed me to broaden my understanding of new media as a whole and game studies as a discipline.
Kelsey will continue her new media studies at the University of Pittsburgh where she will pursue a PhD in Media Studies beginning Fall 2015.
Laurette Garner, MA Arts Management
Specializes in: Arts Management, Digital Tools, and Media Theory
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
My research is looking into how audience participation changed from vaudeville to early film and how new media practices influenced these changes.
Lydel Matthews, MA Arts Administration
Specializes in: Social enterprise, cultural tourism, and artisan cooperatives in Latin America
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
I am participating in a team research project titled “Strategies for Cultivating a Sustainable Arts and Culture District in Eugene.” For this project I am helping develop a set of recommendations for the City of Eugene as they plan to cultivate a sustainable Arts and Culture District. My individual role within the collaborative research project, “Stewards of Cultural Vitality,” identifies how artists and creative entrepreneurs can foster cultural vitality and stewardship within the district.
My experience with the NMCC helped me gain some familiarity with tech industry vernacular. This supported the development of my research as I interviewed creative entrepreneurs throughout the Eugene arts and culture community.
Bryce Peake, PhD Media Studies
Specializes in: My research on masculinity, science, media technology, and the state is engaged with ongoing discussions in media anthropology and the history of science and technology about epistemology and difference. Of course these are very broad categories, and their broadness is reflected in my published work: from Zombie Walks and the psychosemiotics of embodying gendered media images; to “scientism” and misogynist infopolitics on English Wikipedia; through the somatic histories of emerging media tech and state formation in the British empire; and ending with a project that takes the critiques of gender and science developed in my previous work, and uses that as the foundation for a more socially conscious design approach to data tracking technologies for people living with tinnitus in underserved communities.
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
My dissertation “Listening and/as Technology in British Gibraltar, 1930-2013” is a historical ethnography of listening practices and listening technologies in the British colony/overseas territory of Gibraltar. The primary theoretical contribution of the project is an exploration of what I call “standpoint acoustemology,” which refers to the ways that Gibraltarian men’s media listening practices — what sounds they recognize, how they experience/embody them — is shaped by this history of colonial media regulation and scientific evaluation that was itself situated within historical gender, race, and class antagonisms between the English and their colonial others. As the title suggests, I begin with the moments of state formation, and locate the reverberations of that history in the ways Gibraltarian men listening to media technologies today.
Following graduation Bryce will continue to share his passion for new media at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies. Bryce is especially excited for the opportunity this position will give him to apply his background in social scientific methods and history of social science (and his time working with research scientists at Intel Labs) to craft a unique research methods course targeted at preparing students for emerging and new media fields (e.g. Interactive Design, Human Computer Interaction, Web Development, etc.).
Emily Ridout, MA Folkelore
Specializes in: Tourism, Folklore, The Environment, Food/Beverage, Esoteric Religion, Yoga
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
I make documentaries and media objects surrounding tourism, food/beverage engagement, and folklore. I am interested in new approaches to environmental protection.
Post graduation, Emily will be working in Eugene with the Oregon Folklife Network and will continue working on video production.
Edwin Wang, MA Media Studies
Specializes in: New Media, Smartphones, Communication, and Technology
Graduating from UO: Spring 2015
Edwin’s masters thesis focuses on social interactions with smartphones. His empirical work reveals that the social dispositional factors of the user are associated with the extent that they anthropomorphize and trust smartphones as the prominent mode of communication technology
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